Everyone reads a different book. That's what's interesting. Everyone sees a different film, as well. We bring our past lives to whatever work of art we're experiencing at that moment, and that's what makes it interesting. It's not mathematics. There are different answers for different people.

What better portrait of a writer than to show a man who has been bewitched by books?

...once you fell in love with her, you loved her until the day you died.

He no longer wished to be dead. At the same time, it cannot be said that he was glad to be alive. But at least he did not resent it. He was alive, and the stubbornness of this fact had little by little begun to fascinate him - as if he had managed to outlive himself, as if he were somehow living a posthumous life.

Betty died of a broken heart. Some people laugh when they hear that phrase, but that's because they don't know anything about the world. People die of broken hearts. It happens every day, and it will go on happening to the end of time.

The things we remember are often things that have great emotional importance, and so they have a lasting effect.

The moon people do not eat by swallowing food but by smelling it. Their money is poetry - actual poems, written out on pieces of paper whose value is determined by the worth of the poem itself.